All Politics is now Global

Tag Archives: Fascism

To reiterate: People are genetically biased against change, because change means potential danger. People are also genetically biased against acknowledging this bias, because they wish to see themselves as being able to cope with both change and danger. Put together, this means that when changes come, people are largely unprepared or underprepared.

Take this beyond the bias of the individual, and apply it to that of the group (s)he belongs to, the vantage point of a society, and you find the bias multiplies and becomes self-confirming. That is, the members of the group reinforce each other’s bias. When change comes in small and gradual steps, as it mostly does, this can be said to work relatively well. When it comes in large and sudden steps, trouble ensues. Continue reading →

“Amid a highly volatile world situation, it becomes particularly important to strengthen reliable good-neighbourly relations between our countries,” Shoigu said at talks with his Chinese counterpart General Chang Wanquan. Continue reading →

The government of Turkey is building a 15-acre, $100 million mega-mosque in Lanham, Maryland. Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan visited the site on May 15 as part of his official visit to the U.S.. The state of Maryland was officially represented at the event by its Secretary of State John McDonough.

The event was also attended by the leaders of two U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities. Continue reading →

A new book out in Germany reveals how President Kennedy was a secret admirer of the Nazis.

The news comes embarrassingly close to a visit being paid to Berlin next month by President Obama – one week before 50th anniversary commemorations of JFK’s memorable ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech pledging US solidarity with Europe during the Cold War. Continue reading →

What is the difference between printing money and counterfeiting? There is none.

Counterfeiting is illegal because it is the false creation of value. The counterfeiter takes low-value paper and turns it into high-value money, which is fundamentally a claim on the real productive value of the economy that issues the currency and recognizes it as a proxy means of exchanging that productive value.

Counterfeiting is illegal because the counterfeiter creates no additional value–he creates only the proxy for value. Creating real value–adding meaningful goods or services to the economy–is tedious, hard work. How much easier to simply transform near-worthless paper into a claim on actual goods and services.

If this is illegal, then would somebody please arrest the Board of the Federal Reserve for counterfeiting? The Fed has blatantly printed money without creating any real value to back up their added claims on productive value. Hence they are counterfeiting, pure and simple. A government based on rule of law would arrest these fraudsters and cons at the earliest possible convenience.

And while you’re drawing up the indictment, can you also charge them with counterfeiting competence and policy, as they have demonstrated the Peter Principle par excellence: the Board has risen to its highest level of incompetence. Their counterfeit policies have wreaked incomparable damage on the real productive economy.

The essence of counterfeit policy–a fake policy that claims to be something it is not–is “extend and pretend.” And the sole goal of “extend and pretend” is self-preservation and the preservation of the Financial Elite which has tightened its grip on the nation’s throat as a direct consequence of Federal Reserve policies–notably “extend and pretend.”

A specter is haunting the academy—the specter of the “New Communism.” Astonishingly, a worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, has made a comeback.

The leading proponents of the New Communism are the “academic rock-star” Slavoj Zizek and the philosopher and ex-Maoist Alain Badiou. Other leading figures are Michael Hardt, Gianni Vattimo, Bruno Bosteels from Cornell University, Alessandro Russo, Judith Balso, and Alberto Toscano.

All spoke at “The Idea of Communism,” a conference held in London in 2009 that attracted nearly 1000 people paying more than 100 pounds each. Since the conference, a little publishing industry has grown up, making the “New Communism” respectable on campus.

Of course, since the crash of 2008 it is not surprising that intellectual alternatives to global capitalism are undergoing a revival. The scandal does not lie in the insistence that a global alternative to the present system be held open, but that communism, of all things, is being proposed as that global alternative.

A democratic critique of the New Communism must focus on three defining features. Each marks it out as a theoretical disaster.